How Much Money Is Your Business Losing to Task Switching Fees?

If your company is like most businesses, your employees are busy… probably very busy. It’s not just executives who have to deal with the Storm. Senior managers and even department heads have to play their own games of whack-a-mole. How does this impact your bottom line?

Imagine you’re a young manager, gunning for a VP position. You’re working on your department’s quarterly report, and you’ve got several performance reviews on the back burner. Meanwhile, your inbox is blowing up with requests, and you still have to pick up your daughter from school. No doubt about it: you’re in the Storm.

This employee is not going to be at their most productive. They’re going to be distracted, and each time they switch tasks, it will take time for the attention residue to fade. These task switching fees cause a drop in productivity, and if you do the math, you’ll be shocked at how expensive they are.

FACTS:

A busy employee gets interrupted every 11 minutes.
Task switching wastes 23 minutes worth of attention on average.
With a salary of $50,000 per year, that’s $20,000 in lost productivity. At $75,000 per year, the annual loss increases to $30,000.
Let’s say you have 7 employees; that is a loss of $140,000 to $210,000!

If you do the math, a busy employee loses an average of 839 hours of productivity per year to task-switching fees, assuming they work 40 hours a week. That’s almost exactly 40% of their productivity.

Now, do the same math for each of your employees. Or just look at how much you’re spending on payroll, and take 40% of that number. That’s how much money you’re spending on task switching fees.

SOLUTIONS:

Establish policies to limit interruptions.

For example, “meeting-free Friday” or “email-free zones.”

Set up a communications ladder for urgent vs. non-urgent communications. E.g. employees can take 24 hours to answer an email, but phone calls are urgent.

Lead by example.

If you tell your employees not to send emails after 5 PM, don’t send emails after 5 PM. (You can queue them to send in the morning).

“When you're on a treadmill, constantly task switching,
it's just not possible to achieve flow.”

– Dr. Gloria Mark, attention researcher